The "What Ifs" of Emancipation

A blogger known as "the Ape Man" is shocked by Larison's characterization of Lincoln as a "tyrant" and my pondering the justice of that rather severe historical judgment.

My sin in the pongid world is to have asked whether, if the North had let the South go without war, slavery would have long persisted in the South. I can also ask whether, given the blood spilled in the War and the rapid turn away from Reconstruction, Lincoln was far-sighted, bloody-minded, or a bit of both.

Brazil abolished slavery without a war in 1888. In 1871, the “Free Womb” law passed, making all children of slave mothers free at birth. In 1885 the “Sexagenarian Law” passed, freeing all slaves when they reached 65, and in 1888 slavery was abolished in its entirety.

The U.S. Civil War started in 1861, and the official story was that it was being fought to preserve the Union, which continued to include slave states. Pressure for emancipation grew in the North, and in 1862-1863 Lincoln used his war powers to issue proclamations that declared slaves free in rebel States. It was part of a strategy, combined with blockade and the depredations of Sherman, among other things, to destroy the Southern economy.

If the Confederacy had simply been allowed to secede, where would the room to expand, apparently necessary to the slave system, have come from? Would slavery have been compatible with a more advanced technology? Would the South have evolved toward emancipation, as did Brazil? In fact, by 1876, white supremacy came roaring back, not seriously challenged until 3/4 of a century later.

The “what ifs” are all conjectural history, of course, but whatever the truth and whatever the real goal of the North’s war, the 600,000 dead and countless maimed was a very high price to pay, as was the unleashing of industrial-scale warfare. The carnage of the Civil War was unrivaled until the maniacal slaughter of World War I, fought, if one accepts the sanctimony of Woodrow Wilson, to “make the world safe for democracy,” but in fact opening the door to Bolshevism, fascism and Nazism.

Lincoln is justly remembered as larger than life, a fascinating and eloquent figure, whose victory opened the way to the modern, industrial United States, for good or ill. Southern nostalgia generally gives slavery the once-over-lightly. Was there another possible outcome?

Perhaps.

"The Tyrant Lincoln"?

What he might have also remarked on was the odd habit that some of Mr. Bush’s supporters seem to have in comparing him to the tyrant Lincoln as a way of praising his leadership or urging him to follow Lincoln’s example. (Perhaps the comparisons between two Presidents who routinely violated the Constitution and launched aggressive wars are just too obvious to be ignored.)

--Daniel Larison

Daniel Larison is a prolific blogger, a self-proclaimed paleoconservative, who writes well and frequently surprises with his insights.

Last summer my daughter and I visited Washington, and of course visited the Lincoln Memorial. Inscribed on the wall in giant letters are his eloquent words from the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural. I have always been taught, and assumed, that Lincoln was a remarkable leader.

There is a contrary view, as reflected in this debate, for example, and in various writings of H.L.Mencken, such as this:

The Gettysburg speech was at once the shortest and the most famous oration in American history... the highest emotion reduced to a few poetical phrases. Lincoln himself never even remotely approached it. It is genuinely stupendous. But let us not forget that it is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it. Put it into the cold words of everyday. The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination—that government of the people, by the people, for the people, should not perish from the earth. It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves.

I have wondered myself whether the goal of preserving the Union was worth the 600,000 lives that were lost in the war, and whether a negotiated separation would have been better in the long run. Would slavery have been abolished in the South within a generation, as it was in Brazil, without war, and without the violent reaction that ended in the system of Jim Crow?

The Civil War was the first industrialized war, and resulted in slaughter on a massive scale, the suspension of many constitutional liberties, and set the stage for the next period of centralized power, the growth of trusts, and the emergence of America as an assertive world power a generation later.

Lincoln was a larger than life figure. Was he our greatest President, or as Larison says, a tyrant?

Not a closed question.